On Faith, a feature of the Washington Post offers an analysis of how President-elect Barack Obama won the election on the faith and values issues:
Now that Barack Obama is president-elect we have to figure out how issues pertaining to religion contributed to his victory. I will get to the exit-poll data tomorrow, but tonight I want to float the following theory: On the Faith and Values front Obama won this election, in part, because he avoided all the errors made by the Kerry campaign in 2004.
Some of the ideas are:
Not “an Evangelical’s worst nightmare”: Unlike Kerry, who scared the bejesus out of many conservative Christians, Obama gave them no salient reason to loathe him. He was a proud servant of Christ. He had no problem giving a shout out to Jesus. He could thump Bible with the best of them.
The ground game, silent but deadly: They avoided that catastrophe by methodically and expertly developing dense networks of surrogates and influential supporters in Catholic communities (and other communities)….. So the narrative that emerges is of a candidate who spoke about religion enthusiastically, but not excessively in public. But on the less manifest level, there was a lot of community organizing afoot (thus answering the question asked at the Republican National Convention as to what that particular vocation entails). This out-of-sight, local, religiously based outreach is the most devastating innovation of Faith and Values technology since candidates started saying “May God Bless America.”
Read it more here.